The Toymakers(54)

‘What do you think, little thing?’ he said, eyeing the Imperial Kapitan. ‘I’m going to have to talk to you. If I don’t talk to somebody, I’m bound to go mad, and you’re the only one there is …’

The Imperial Kapitan eyed him with its unflinching face.

‘If only you could talk. Why, then we’d see …’

Clasping the Kapitan, Emil ventured on to the shopfloor. There would be the customers. His days would be filled with showing boys battles, or restacking shelves, or taking the most brave shoppers on tours of the jungles his father was planting, where all manner of patchwork creatures would frolic in the vines. It wasn’t as if there would be no joy. The world would stop turning before there was an Emporium winter without any joy.

A noise from above drew his eye. Kaspar was dangling from one of the galleries where the frame of Emil’s cloud castle was tethered, its towers and portcullis borne up by a reef of churning steam. Moments later, Martha perched on the balcony beside him and, goaded on by Kaspar, dropped over the edge. Together they released their fingers – and would have plummeted down, if only Kaspar’s longships with their dragon head prows had not appeared underneath. Kaspar dropped into the first, Martha into the second – and the dragons, opening their jaws in the way Kaspar had designed, took off, as if swimming in the cloud castle’s moat.

Laughter fell around Emil like a deluge of rain. The longships swooped and turned at the command of their mechanical oarsmen, but what was keeping them afloat Emil dared not guess. Impressive as his cloud castle was, any engineer with half an interest in atmospherics might have achieved the same thing. But those longships? Those longships had sailed straight out of Kaspar’s dreams and into the Emporium air.

Another voice joined the laughter above. And there was Cathy, at the same balcony rail with Sirius yapping at her side. She had been admonishing them (she always admonished their escapades), but as Kaspar’s dragonboat completed its circle and drew near, something changed. Emil saw her head drop to one side (how beautiful she looked when she disapproved and yet approved at the very same time!); then, timing her leap perfectly, she propelled herself over the side.

The dragonboat tilted as she hit it. Moments later she and Kaspar were off, hunting Martha in the mist, the dragon heads showering sparks as the laughter continued to pour down.

Yes, the Emporium was a place of joy, but without the shop hands this winter the joy could never be Emil’s. ‘What would you have me do?’ he whispered, but the Imperial Kapitan offered no reply.

That evening, Martha would not listen to her stories. She asked: ‘What does it mean, Mama? Is there to be a real war, like the ones Papa and Uncle Emil play? With cavalry charges and a noisy cannonade?’

Cathy stroked the hair out of her eyes. ‘Why do you say that, my treasure?’

‘None of the shop hands are coming, are they? They’re to fight their real wars. But why do people fight wars, Mama? Why, when there are toy soldiers to do it for them?’

What an Emporium thing to say! Only a girl raised in these aisles could think such a thing. And yet, she thought, why not?

‘Whatever happens, whatever things they do out there in the world, it won’t touch us, not here, not in our Emporium. What you saw at the embassy, that isn’t coming here. You’re safe here, my treasure, safe with your mama.’

When she reached their own chamber, Kaspar was already in bed. Cathy ordered Sirius away, off to guard Martha through the long night, and would have sat down herself, if only her feet hadn’t kept on walking.

‘I’ve seen you like this before. You’re prowling, prowling like a caged tiger.’

‘I’m frightened, Kaspar.’

This was new. The Cathy Kaspar had fallen in love with had never admitted such a thing. He lifted himself from the covers. ‘Whatever happens, whatever things they do out there in the world—’

‘That’s precisely what I just told Martha. You can’t pull the old lines on me, Kaspar. We wrote those lines together, remember?’

Kaspar said, ‘There’s no need to be afraid.’

‘But Dunmore and Kesey and little Douglas Flood … off to carry bayonets like it’s just another game. If they’ve gone, how many others?’

‘Thousands, I shouldn’t wonder. Thousands and thousands and thousands.’ Kaspar had said it dreamily, but now he came to his senses. ‘Whatever happens out there, it won’t be like the Long War. What sort of madness might that be? To wind up a battalion of living things and march them at one another, as if that might win a war?’

Kaspar took her by the hand, drew her down to the bedsheets. If the Emporium’s magics would not make her forget the outside world tonight, well, there were other ways. He rolled over her, staring at her dewy-eyed until she could no longer contain her laughter. He looked pointedly absurd when he glared at her like that, and he knew it.

‘You’re a fool. War declared, our shop hands gone, panic in the aisles and blood on the streets – and you, all you can think about is this …’

All the same, it was Cathy who kissed him first.

That night, in bed, she had dreamt about blood on the streets; three mornings later, there it was, in lurid smears up and down the Emporium doors, a dried-up pool of viscera spreading out into Iron Duke Mews.

Mrs Hornung was already on her hands and knees, the pail of water at her side frothing with scarlet soap, when Cathy arrived. Cathy had come in search of a letter, for Lizzy wrote often and her stories were better than anything in the Reader’s Digest magazines, but no postman had dared a delivery this morning. A pig’s head sat in the middle of the filth, warning strangers away.